I don’t really buy the “butterfly effect” as it corresponds to extinction risk. That is, I think that to meaningfully affect chances of survival, you can’t just quantum-randomize small-scale events.
This seems like a quite strong empirical claim. It may be the case that tiny physical differences eventually have large counterfactual effects on the world. For example, if you went back in time 1000 years and painted someone’s house a different color, my probability distribution for the weather here and now would look like the historical average for weather here, rather than the weather in the original timeline. Certainly we don’t have reason to believe in a snowball effect, where if you make a small change, the future tends to look significantly different in (something like) the direction of that change—but I think we do have reason to believe in a butterfly effect, in which small changes have unpredictable, eventually-large effects. The alternative is a strong empirical claim that the universe is stable (not sure how to make this precise), I think.
For example, if you went back in time 1000 years and painted someone’s house a different color, my probability distribution for the weather here and now would look like the historical average for weather here, rather than the weather in the original timeline.
I think the crux here may not be the butterfly effect, but the overall accumulated effect of (quantum) randomness: I would expect that if you went 1000 years back and just “re-ran” the world from the same quantum state (no house painting etc.), the would would be different (at least on the human-preceivable level; not sure about weather) just because so many events are somewhat infuenced by (micro-state) quantum randomness.
The question is only the extent of the quantum effects on the macro-state (even without explicit quantum coin flips) but I expect this to be quite large e.g. in human biology and in particular brain—see my other comment (Re 2.) (NB: independent from any claims about brain function relying on quantum effects etc.).
(Note that I would expect the difference after 1000 years to be substantially larger if you consider the entire world-state to be a quantum state with some superpositions, where e.g. the micro-states of air molecules are mostly unobserved and in various superpositions etc., therefore increasing the randomness effect substantially … but that is merely an additional intuition.)
Good point, and that’s a crux between two not-unreasonable positions, but my intuition is that even if the universe was deterministic, if you (counterfactually) change house color, the day-to-day weather 1000 years later has essentially no correlation between the two universes.
You could make this precise by thinking of attractor states. E.g., if I’d scored less well in any one exam as a kid, or if some polite chit-chat had gone slightly differently, I think the difference gets rounded down to 0, because that doesn’t end up affecting any decisions.
I’m thinking of some kinds of extinction risk as attractor states that we have to exert some pressure (and thus some large initial random choice) to avoid. E.g., unaligned AGI seems like one of those states.
For example, if you went back in time 1000 years and painted someone’s house a different color, my probability distribution for the weather here and now would look like the historical average for weather here, rather than the weather in the original timeline
This would surprise me, but I could just have wrong intuitions here. But even assuming that is the case, small initial changes would have to snowball fast and far enough to eventually avert an x-risk.
Hmm. At the very least, if you have some idealized particles bouncing around in a box, minutely changing the direction of one causes, as time goes to infinity, the large counterfactual effect of fully randomizing the state of the box (or if you prefer, something like redrawing the state from the random variable representing possible states of the box).
I’d be surprised if our world was much more stable (meaning something like: characterized by attractor states), but this seems like a hard and imprecise empirical question, and I respect that your intuitions differ.
Like, suppose that instead of “preventing extinction”, we were talking about “preventing the industrial revolution”. Sure, there are butterfly effects which could avoid that, but it seems weird.
This seems like a quite strong empirical claim. It may be the case that tiny physical differences eventually have large counterfactual effects on the world. For example, if you went back in time 1000 years and painted someone’s house a different color, my probability distribution for the weather here and now would look like the historical average for weather here, rather than the weather in the original timeline. Certainly we don’t have reason to believe in a snowball effect, where if you make a small change, the future tends to look significantly different in (something like) the direction of that change—but I think we do have reason to believe in a butterfly effect, in which small changes have unpredictable, eventually-large effects. The alternative is a strong empirical claim that the universe is stable (not sure how to make this precise), I think.
I think the crux here may not be the butterfly effect, but the overall accumulated effect of (quantum) randomness: I would expect that if you went 1000 years back and just “re-ran” the world from the same quantum state (no house painting etc.), the would would be different (at least on the human-preceivable level; not sure about weather) just because so many events are somewhat infuenced by (micro-state) quantum randomness.
The question is only the extent of the quantum effects on the macro-state (even without explicit quantum coin flips) but I expect this to be quite large e.g. in human biology and in particular brain—see my other comment (Re 2.) (NB: independent from any claims about brain function relying on quantum effects etc.).
(Note that I would expect the difference after 1000 years to be substantially larger if you consider the entire world-state to be a quantum state with some superpositions, where e.g. the micro-states of air molecules are mostly unobserved and in various superpositions etc., therefore increasing the randomness effect substantially … but that is merely an additional intuition.)
Good point, and that’s a crux between two not-unreasonable positions, but my intuition is that even if the universe was deterministic, if you (counterfactually) change house color, the day-to-day weather 1000 years later has essentially no correlation between the two universes.
You could make this precise by thinking of attractor states. E.g., if I’d scored less well in any one exam as a kid, or if some polite chit-chat had gone slightly differently, I think the difference gets rounded down to 0, because that doesn’t end up affecting any decisions.
I’m thinking of some kinds of extinction risk as attractor states that we have to exert some pressure (and thus some large initial random choice) to avoid. E.g., unaligned AGI seems like one of those states.
This would surprise me, but I could just have wrong intuitions here. But even assuming that is the case, small initial changes would have to snowball fast and far enough to eventually avert an x-risk.
Hmm. At the very least, if you have some idealized particles bouncing around in a box, minutely changing the direction of one causes, as time goes to infinity, the large counterfactual effect of fully randomizing the state of the box (or if you prefer, something like redrawing the state from the random variable representing possible states of the box).
I’d be surprised if our world was much more stable (meaning something like: characterized by attractor states), but this seems like a hard and imprecise empirical question, and I respect that your intuitions differ.
Like, suppose that instead of “preventing extinction”, we were talking about “preventing the industrial revolution”. Sure, there are butterfly effects which could avoid that, but it seems weird.